Not New Poems but Translations: Ezra Pound’s Image-Centered Cathay from Chinese Tang Poetry

This article reassesses Ezra Pound’s Cathay as translation from Chinese Tang poetry rather than autonomous modernist verse. Building on Pound’s own poetics and compact coordinates from Chinese lyric theory, we argue that Cathay maintains translational fidelity by preserving and sharpening images while accepting losses in prosodic form and thinning some culture-specific encyclopaedias. Methodologically, we conduct a qualitative, contrastive microanalysis of two Li Bai poems “送友人” (Taking Leave of a Friend) and “长干行” (The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter), aligning the Chinese text, a neutral interlinear gloss, and Pound’s English version. A coding scheme tracks image handling, cultural markers, prosody, and the balance of phanopoeia, melopoeia, and logopoeia alongside domestication/foreignization choices. Findings show a stable hierarchy—image (phanopoeia)–stance (logopoeia)–sound/form (melopoeia)—that aligns with Chinese esthetic dynamics of yi/xiang (idea/form) and qing/jing (emotion/scene). Pound’s practice preserves correlative imagery (mountains/river/sunset; moss/leaves/butterflies) and voice, while paratextual titling, address terms, folklore allusions, toponyms, and a fifth-month calendar line reveal domestications, distortions, or omissions traceable to mediation via Fenollosa’s notes. We propose mechanism-sensitive criteria for evaluating distant-pair lyric translation: not formal replication, but reconstruction of the poem’s image–scene–emotion economy. On that basis, Cathay functions as translation—at justified costs. Rather than resolving the long-standing debate on Cathay, we offer a mechanism-sensitive account of how, in two central Li Bai poems, Pound’s image-centred poetics yields a limited but defensible form of translational fidelity within a relay-translation setting.